Well, what an event this has been so far. I’m so glad we made the effort to come as it’s the best conference I have ever attended (I went to a fair few boring SEO affairs back in the day).

Unfortunately, Duncan and I were hangover victims for the entire first day after one of the waitresses at the Buy.at pre-event networking party took a shine to Duncan. This resulted in us being somewhat replete with the rather nice free wine and staggering home at a rather disgraceful 2am. I can’t have been too bad mind you, I was free of mystery injuries and there was a notable lack of traffic cones in our room! You can take the girl out of uni…

However, this didn’t stop us from attending some great conference sessions yesterday. I’ve taken lots of notes with tips and resources from some top affiliate industry types and I will be doing some session by session posts where I think there’s something useful for you guys.

Highlights so far…

- Chatting to a Scottish guy for 40 minutes at the buy.at party. He asked me where I was from. When I said, “I’m from near Girvan in Ayrshire.”
He said, “No Way!!! What a coincidence, there’s this girl with a really great blog from down that area, you must live REALLY close to her”
“Umm, that’s me?”
“No WAY!!! I thought you were a bit of a heiffer” (Ayrshire term for someone of bovine appearance)

He really, really ruined that rather nice moment for me.

- The meet the super affiliates panel. Not only is it good to see these guys close up (although I saw Kieron for a quick chat the night before) But there was some good, insightful knowledge and it was jam packed with tips for newbies that made an awful lot of sense.

- Hero from Webgains winning the award for best account manager. I thought this was so well deserved, she works incredibly hard and is a pleasure to deal with. Congratulations Hero!

- Finally getting the fish and chips after the award ceremony. Myself and the lovely people from Figleaves were so hungry that we all ended up seperately ambushing unsuspecting waiting staff for boxes of food. The result? 8 boxes of fish and chips between the four of us! We ate them all too.

- Kieron winning the award for best blog of 2007. Another well deserved win. It must have been a very close call between him and Fraser. Even Kieron felt the night before that Fraser would win. I doubt Fraser will mind to much at the moment, he’s far too busy adoring his new baby.

- The Affiliate Window freebies. Gotta love the first aid kit and the medicine bottles full of Jelly Beans. All the guys were dressed in white coats too. “resolving your affiliate marketing ills” was the general theme, and I thought it was hilarious.

Well, I’m sat in my jim jams right now drinking tea and trying to wake up to go and enjoy another action packed day. I’m going to try and chat with some more people today… I was finding communication somewhat difficult at certain points yesterday!